The Life of Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite authors. He wrote the only page-turner about English grammar ever written, The King's English: my dog-eared copy sits in a basket of Playboys next to my toilet. Lucky Jim is one of my favorite novels: with Colonel Sun, Amis surpassed Ian Fleming's best Bond books. And even his tossed-off novels are basically seaside literature, in the truest sense of the world.

So I was riveted by this piece over at the Telegraph by Kingsley biographer and family friend Zachary Leader, who discussed his writing, his literary persona, his many lovers and infidelities and even some of his family's darker secrets:

Among the most difficult or delicate material I included was an account of Martin's sister, Sally, whose life was calamitous from the start. At two years and nine months, she fell from a table in the garden, landing on her head and fracturing her skull, went into convulsions, then a coma and nearly died. Some months later, while staying with her paternal grandparents, her grandmother died in her presence.

The circumstances of her death were particularly upsetting, for the grandfather had just gone to work and Sally was left alone all day with her grandmother's body. When Amis's father returned home, he discovered his wife lying dead on the bedroom floor, her face smeared with the lipstick Sally had removed from her handbag and clumsily tried to apply to her lips.

Leader's biography, The Life of Kingsley Amis, is due out on December 19th.

'I want more than my share' [Telegraph]